Sir Patrick Bateson, who has died aged 79, was a former Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and an animal behaviourist who was not afraid to put his head above the parapet in controversies over animal welfare; among other things he conducted a study into the hunting of deer with hounds which led to the sport being banned on National Trust land.

Bateson’s main interest lay in the processes which translate genetic and environmental influences into changes in animal behaviour, beginning with “imprinting”, whereby animals bond instinctively with their parents and learn to recognise members of their own species.

The great authority in the field in the early 20th century was the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who collaborated with the Dutch biologist Niko Tinbergen in developing ethology (the study of animal behaviour) as a separate sub-discipline of biology. Lorenz saw...